It’s all German to me…

When it comes to food storage and preparation, one of the things I always emphasize to folks is how important it is to be familiar with your food. Far too often people amass a respectable food storage supply and then that’s it. It stops there. It reminds me of an incident that I experienced a couple weeks ago.

I was up at my parents’ house going to a family reunion and as we were leaving, I scraped my knuckles. Look, anyone who’s seen my hands would know they’re no strangers to abrasions and such, but this time it was bleeding more than a few minutes of pressure with a paper napkin would cure.

So I jumped into the backseat of my car, pulled out the stock first aid kit, and proceeded to become completely dumbfounded and bewildered by what I saw when I opened it up. To make a long story short, all of the packaging was the same…white and all of the copy on the packaging was in German!

(Don’t get any ideas…it’s a junky old 2007 Audi A3.)

My point is even though I am a first aid /CPR instructor…my training had no impact when it came to reading flippin’ German. I had not taken the time to familiarize myself with kit prior to needing it and as a result, had to open and waste roughly half of the packaging before I found simple Band-Aids.

It’s the same with food storage. It’s all preparation, right? The thing most fail to realize however, is that getting familiar with your food storage involves two kinds offamiliar that you need to be…familiar with.

“Knowing what you HAVE.” vs. “Knowing what you are EATING.”

No, they are not the same thing. Knowing what food you have means having an up-to-date record of what food you have, when it expires, its nutritional value, and an estimate of how long it would last on a minimum calories per day basis.

Knowing what you are eating, on the other hand, is having a physical familiarity with the food you ingest and knowing how to prepare it for maximal nutritional and caloric benefit. In my traveling experience, there was always one thing that was more difficult for my body to adjust to than jet lag and it was the digestive issues that stemmed from the unfamiliar cuisine.

This issue of food familiarity is in my experience, something we need to be spending more time learning about. A really good exercise I use with my family is integrating food storage into our camping menus. It makes sense really, on multiple levels. Being outdoors. Not having access to gas/electric stoves. No modern conveniences. It may be pretend, but it’s great practice and remember, it’s practice that helps people perform under stress and pressure. (Plus, it’s given me a lot of opportunity to perfect some of my favorite Campfire Cookin’ Recipes.)

The take home is the more you know about your resources and abilities, the more successful you will be at adapting to change in your environment. It’s the basic definition of fitness in biological terms and that’s what it boils down to at the end of the day…survival of the fittest.

If you’d like to try one of my favorite campfire cooking recipes, take a look at the Campfire Cookin’ Meal Kit. I personally handpicked every item in there to go with each of the 10 Jax Finn original recipes you and your family can use on your next camping trip. As a bonus, eFoodsDIRECT is offering $50 off the kit if you order now and a free download of 10 Essential Campfire Cookin’ Recipes by Jax Finn.